The beverage industry has a true abolitionist—and it’s not New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. It’s a guy who was born in Queens, N.Y. before his family whisked him away to Israel at age 8. Daniel Birnbaum believes the soft-drink and bottled-water business is, by turns, “flawed,” “broken,” “wrong,” “stupid” and “evil.” But, unlike the mayor, he doesn’t want to deliver us just from calories. He wants to smash our ties to Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. “The world has a drinking problem,” he says with a John Brown-ish glint in his eye. “They are consuming these bottles and cans they don’t need. It should be illegal!”

Birnbaum is also the CEO of SodaStream International of Airport City, Israel. It makes devices that carbonate plain tap water and flavor it so it tastes very much like the bad guys’ stuff. But SodaStream has three critical selling points. It’s cheaper than soda: Each 60-liter canister of carbon dioxide, which you exchange at retailers for $15 a pop, creates roughly 100 20-ounce bottles or 170 12-ounce cans. It’s slightly healthier: SodaStream flavorings are made with lower-calorie natural sugar, Splenda or Stevia. And there’s practically no waste, since the machine works with a reusable glass or plastic bottle.

Americans toss away a staggering 130 billion bottles and cans that end up in landfills or incinerators every year. In Birnbaum’s Big Cola-emancipated utopia you quickly reduce that number by embracing a SodaStream device at every drink stop in your day: the AquaBar for filtered hot or cold water to make soda, coffee or tea at the office; at lunch, a pitcher with flavor capsules; isotonic formulas available at the gym; a municipal seltzer fountain on your way home (these exist in Paris); mixed carbonated drinks in the evening.

“Fifty years ago you weren’t drinking out of a plastic bottle,” says Birnbaum, 49. “In 50 years you won’t drink out of a plastic bottle. Our goal is to speed up the process.” He aims to convert 20% of American households—20 million-plus families— over the next decade. Only trouble is that while SodaStream’s U.S. revenues have doubled in each of the last three years, it now has only 0.7% of the carbonated beverage market.

He wasn’t always such an effervescent evangelist. Birnbaum grew up on family camping trips in the Midwest and fondly recalls root beer from A&W drive-throughs as his favorite soda. After his family moved to Israel Birnbaum graduated from the Hebrew University with a B.A. in business administration and economics, then went on to get a Harvard M.B.A. For 15 years he ran Israeli affiliates of multinationals like Pillsbury and Nike.

While chief of Nike Israel he got a call in late 2006 from a Harvard friend at Fortissimo Capital, the private equity fund in Rosh Haayin. Fortissimo was kicking the tires at SodaStream, founded in 1903 by Guy Hugh Gilbey (as in the gin distiller), who invented an “aerating liquid” machine for the Noël Coward classes. Gilbey’s device also used compressed CO2, yet the patent, filed in 1914, makes reference to numerous additional valves, pistons and plungers. In time it was bought by Cadbury Schweppes and then Soda-Club, an Israeli outfit.

When Birnbaum caught up with it, the company “seemed rusty, dusty, not very exciting.” And when his friend asked him to sit in on a marketing presentation—delivered by a lawyer, since there was no marketing department— Birnbaum sensed doom. “No basic questions could be answered,” he says. “Things like, why aren’t you in the U.S.? In Russia? I told him, ‘It feels like everything is wrong, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’”

Fortissimo bought the company for $10 million, half of that in a note. Three weeks later Birnbaum got another call: Would he like to run the bubbleless company?

That’s when his zeal overcame his better judgment. “Life became more about doing something significant, important, grand,” he says, warming to the memory. “I felt people were looking at me like I was crazy.”

Birnbaum’s first act was to push into the U.S. SodaStream had more or less flooded western Europe (which still accounts for more than half its sales). Now he persuaded higher-end U.S. retailers—Bloomingdale’s, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, Sur La Table and Bed, Bath & Beyond—to carry seven soda¬making machines from $80 to $200. An oddball assortment of celebrities took up the pitch: Sean Hannity boosted SodaStream on his radio show, Jillian Michaels liked that it was healthy, Susan Sarandon picked up on the environmental crusade and Jim Cramer hosted a taste test on his show (and pushed the stock).